In a simple way, you can monitor a community’s status (maturity) on each of these axes. It is not rocket science and highly subjective, but it is a good framework to organize the action points around. Both for starting up new Communities of practice or for doing a check up on an existing one.The output can be represented in a single (simple again !!) spider chart like this :

Absolute accuracy is not the purpose, but the chart can be a great help to reveal issues and start actions. In this example, there was not a clear shared goal of the CoP and as a consequence, no clear processes were in place to achieve this.

One major principle to remember is that all ‘P’- principles are equally important. Over-investing in one will not compensate for ignoring another.

In the next posts, I will deal with each of the ‘P’-axes in some more detail.

For me the framework is a more practical analysis of a community of practice. It’s advantage being that is easy to explain to a community and it can be used for evaluation. There probably is a link with community – domain – practice. What we do, why, how and where builds the real community feeling, ie all 5 axes. The domain is reflected in who and why (Purpose + People). The practice – what really happens – is reflected in how and what (Processes + Paper).